Rather than a straight adaptation of Carroll’s stories, Woolverton has chosen to stage her story 13 years after the events in the books, which essentially makes this film a sequel of sorts; its closest cousin in this arena is another Disney-sanctioned reworking of classic children’s literature, Walter Murch’s Return to Oz (1985), an extremely dark and violent product of the Reagan era that has virtually nothing to do with Victor Fleming’s candy-colored musical. As Dorothy did in that film, Alice returns to Wonderland years later, only to find it enmeshed in conflict and alarm. Both films reunite their young heroines with an array of weird and endearing characters, and interestingly both also feature queens who are obsessed with decapitation (in Return to Oz, the evil queen keeps a closet of assorted heads to “wear,” whereas in Alice in Wonderland Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen just likes to cut them off).

No longer a little girl, Alice is now a 19-year-old (played by Australian actress Mia Wasikowska) who has only dim memories of her adventures in Wonderland, which she believes to have been childhood dreams. On the cusp of womanhood, she refuses to wear a girdle or stockings (and is thus not “properly dressed” by rigid Victorian standards) as she is ferried to a lavish party that has been organized (unbeknownst to her) to celebrate her impending engagement to a fussy and arrogant young lord with digestive issues. Leaving her would-be betrothed without an answer, Alice takes off after the fabled white rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen) and tumbles down the rabbit hole, essentially re-enacting the opening chapters of Carroll’s book.

Once in Wonderland (whose real name is the more appropriate Underland), Alice comes across all the familiar characters, including Tweedledee and Tweedledum (both played by a heavily CGI-ed Matt Lucas), the grinning Cheshire Cate (voiced by Stephen Fry), Absalom, the hookah-smoking blue caterpillar (voiced by Alan Rickman), and, of course, the Mad Hatter, who is played by Johnny Depp in bizarre yellow contact lenses, white pancake make-up, and a fright wig of shockingly red hair (he looks like a truly nightmarish version of Faye Dunaway at her worst in Mommie Dearest). Of course, because it is Depp behind all the visual outlandishness, you can be sure that there is something deeper working underneath, and one of the film’s true miracles is that he manages to make the Hatter into a compelling character, rather than just the one-note freakshow his appearance would suggest. In true Burton fashion, madness is not a form of debilitation, but rather a romanticized higher state of being; as Alice’s father tells her in the opening prologue, all of the best people are “mad,” a sentiment that she later reiterates to the Hatter.

Burton’s film puts a uniquely matriarchal spin on Carroll’s stories, maintaining the strongest female characters and dispensing with virtually all of the powerful male characters. Thus, all of the males in the story are either mad (the Hatter), bumbling (Tweedledee and Tweedledum), or in the service of a powerful female (as we see with Crispin Glover’s creepy, but ultimately subservient Knave of Hearts). Any and all powerful male characters, including Alice’s father and the King of Hearts, are dead. Meanwhile, Alice finds herself caught in the crossfire between two sisters, the Red Queen (Bonham Carter) and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), both of whom are troubling female archetypes: the Red Queen, with her oddly bulbous head and court of nattering servants, is a shrill monarch who demands decapitation (read: castration, since virtually all of her victims are men) for even the slightest indiscretion (Bonham Carter is particularly adept at screeching “Off with his head!”), while the White Queen is all airy grace with no real grounding (she is constantly posing, even when running, and has committed herself to a life of absolute nonviolence even as she seems to fetishize weaponry).

Alice, then, must discover herself by taking up the mantle of warrior and facing a massive dragon in the film’s Lord of the Rings-ish climactic battle between the forces of white and red. The fact that Alice single-handedly slays the dragon by loping off its head (there’s that decapitation/castration fixation again) gives her a decidedly masculine sense of victory that reaches a strange apex in the film’s denouement, which finds her back in the real world continuing her father’s work of extending British trade routes into the Far East (read: imperialism). Thus, Alice’s journey is not simply down a rabbit hole and back, but rather a process of changing from someone who is constantly acted upon by those around her to a fully self-actualized subject ready to take on the world (it is no small surprise that we see Absalom symbolically curling up into a cocoon at one point).

The fact that all of this underlying subtext is wrapped in an expectedly Burtonian mise-en-scene that is both sensual and nonsensical is to be expected, and when the film doesn’t work all that well it is because it feels derivative, like it’s trying desperately to be all that came before it (comparisons to James Cameron’s Avatar are probably unfair since they were in production at the same time, but its stabs at capturing the best elements of the Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia films are obvious and sometimes awkward). Nevertheless, Burton manages to put his unique visual spin on the familiar elements of the story, although he never quite reaches the heights of Jefferson Airplane’s immortal anthem “White Rabbit” in reminding us that Carroll’s visions are more LSD trip than innocent traipsing through childhood imagination.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment